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Risking it all for fleeting fame

Greg Baum

Archer Elisa Barnard leaves court where an interim restraining order was placed on her and her father. Photo: Domino Postiglione

FINAL WORD

THERE was a time when archery was a major sport. Apollo had a big following around the time of the ancient Olympics. Cupid was a hit too, despite a colourful personal life. Charismatic Robin Hood held the No. 1 ranking for a long time, and the archery academies became oversubscribed. Then he was charged with robbery and disqualified and stripped of his titles. William Tell proved a hard act to follow. Perhaps because too many tried, with calamitous results, archery declined.

In the modern era, it didn't make a comeback until 1972, when it was readmitted to the Olympics.

Odette Snazelle is currently a reserve member of the shadow Olympic archery team. Photo: Domino Postiglione

Still in this and most countries it is a minor sport, much loved by not many, more a recreation than a sport. This is true of perhaps half the sports on the Olympic program. That is not to ridicule them. There is no rule to say that a sport/pastime/recreation must have mass spectator appeal to be worthy and fulfilling. The Olympics are nothing if not a carnival that celebrates this. Soon they will have their moments in such sun as fleetingly shines in London. Besides, I am not going to pick a fight with anyone with such a dead eye.

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But it does put a prohibitive premium on Olympic representation, and sometimes that means perspective becomes as lost as for an archer wearing a blindfold. In a Sydney court last week, Australia's fourth-ranked female archer, Odette Snazelle, accused the father of Australia's third-ranked archer, Elisa Barnard, of trying to intimidate her by stalking her at competitions and denying her the right to shoot at the range at Sydney's Olympic Park. ''I was so scared of Jon Barnard,'' she said. ''I was really fearful of what he was going to do to me.'' Snazelle won an extension of an apprehended violence order issued by police. The perversity is that as things stand, only Australia's No. 1-ranked archer is guaranteed to go to London.

In the prelude to every Olympics, similar stories emerge. The most shocking was in 1994, when the husband of American figure skater Tonya Harding hired a thug to try to break the legs of rival Nancy Kerrigan. It didn't work, but it did establish for Harding byword status in the hall of sporting infamy. Fortunately, few go to such an extreme. Nonetheless, as London nears, the Australian Olympic Commission has retained two leading QCs as so-called appeals consultants, to whom athletes aggrieved by non-selection can turn. The AOC says they will act effectively as athletics ombudsmen, and perhaps to circumvent the four-yearly rush to the Court of Arbitration for Sport.

Illustration: Jim Pavlidis

Sport, supposedly, is mankind at play, joyful, skittish and carefree. So why is it so often so grim? American author Chad Harbach dwells on this momentarily in his remarkable first novel, The Art of Fielding, a fictional work about a baseball prodigy who ultimately is crushed by his own talent. A sportsman begins with a gift and a dream, both blithely simple constructs, Harbach observes, but to exploit that gift usually has to subjugate the dream to monotonous and robotic routines, antithetical to the free-spiritedness that made him so good in the first instance. For some, this drudgery is demoralising. For others, it leads to obsession.

Nearly 10 years ago, I was in a group of journalists on a tour of the Australian Institute of Sport. The purpose was to show off the effort Australia was making to stay ahead of the world in the race for ever-greater sporting glory. At one stage, we found ourselves on the archery range. Two memories endure. One is of a psychologist who talked at long and proud length about the work he was doing to simulate the effect of fatigue and jet lag on archers so that they could learn to compete under duress. He understood how the archers felt, he said, because his wife had been in labour all the previous night and had given birth at dawn that day. He seemed to think that this made him heroic, but to judge from the exchange of glances in our group, the consensus was that it was sad.

The other image is of the archers themselves, two young women loosing off arrows on cue towards a distant target. Their eyes were dull, their faces blank, their body language mute. They neither laughed nor spoke, to us or to each other. No one introduced them. This was not competition, nor in any real sense training, yet there was on that range a sense of something weighing oppressively. I don't know what became of them; I hope it was a medal somewhere.

The other side of the coin is the memory of Simon Fairweather, who in Sydney in 2000 won Australia's only Olympic archery gold medal. For 24 hours, archery was Australia's favourite sport, and Cupid himself could not have more certainly carved a place for Fairweather into the country's heart. But fractionally to each side of that preciously rare bullseye, there will always be the scars of a lot of misses.